Finding Home
by JessicaJ
Summary: Prompt: "He was telling that story again." A twist on the idea that Vincent, not Cloud, was Tifa's childhood friend and first love.


**Finding Home**

(Listen to Active Child - Hanging on; Emma Louise - Jungle)

_A little drabble I wrote centred around one line that popped into my head before bed last night." He was telling that story again." A bit more conceptual than many things I've written before. Hope you enjoy it._

_-0-_

He was telling that story again; the one that made everyone laugh but made her want to scream and tear out her hair because she had heard it so many times before. She can pinpoint every pause he leaves, the ones left for effect, others a space to absorb the laughter. She knows the inflection behind each syllable, the evolution of the listener's expressions, the shift in his breath between each pause.

Parties were his comfort zone, a place for him to thrive. For her, they were hell.

He'd never even noticed.

He had a natural charm with people, a charm that he fully understood and used to his advantage. This man was her husband, yet a complete and utter stranger she was to him.

A chaste kiss on his cheek and a murmur using the words, _drink, fresh air _or _ladies room_, and he wouldn't even bat an eyelid, seamlessly acknowledging her excusing herself while never dropping his attention from whomever stood before him.

She drifts away and out of the sphere of his voice, a burst of laughter punctuating the exact point where he intended it. She does indeed take herself to the ladies room, washing her hands, as if the soap and water would cleanse something other than the surface of her skin. She checks her reflection, not content to see she still wore the detached expression she had worn in her dressing room mirror earlier than evening. She watches the other party goers fluttering about in the mirror behind her, as if she were not really there. With her back turned, she could pretend she was on the outside looking in.

She mills around the refreshments table, habitually passing olives through her lips. Tonight they tasted of nothingness. On any other day, she_ loves _olives – just not today.

She employs a practised reach for glasses of champagne as waiters pass holding them aloft; One, two, three glasses, the red imprint of her mouth fading. She had been gone from his side for what could have been an hour, yet she did not feel liberated; Useless, half of a broken whole.

She drifts, not seeing the art works on display (she forgets the reasons for these parties), the people (she is sure that some must be from the same crowd, but she recalls none of their faces and cannot conjure their names), trying to locate her husband.

He is stood where she left him, the previous group having dispersed, this time talking with a tall and strikingly beautiful woman she had never seen before. Her long willowy legs are bared beneath a stunning but probably too short dress, swathes of ash-coloured hair tumbling about her shoulders. Her laughter is open like an invitation, lighting up her face, her eyes and her body language. She is saying, I find you funny, I am beautiful and I know you want me. She touches his arm, perfectly manicured fingertips lingering for an age until he raises them to his lips.

She is saying, I just want you to see me, and nothing else.

She turns, orienting herself to no particular direction. She would rather look anywhere else, but there, just not there… anywhere, oh please.

"Are you alright?"

A crystal voice cuts through her whirlwind thoughts like a summer's breeze through an open window. There are finger tips at her elbow. Finger tips belonging to a hand, belonging to a tall male wearing a suit. Her eyes find his and in them she finds sanctuary.

His eyes ask her questions, pour out emotions as answers, taking her in, churning her up and reassembling her before him.

She last knew him when she wore ribbons in her hair and scratches on her knees. But it doesn't matter. She remembers transferring sugar lollipops from her mouth to his, because that was what love was. She remembers sunshine and dust tracks, running wildly through grasses taller than she. She remembers being breathless with happiness.

"I've lost my husband." She isn't lying exactly, though her vague positioning is all he needed to know.

He appraises what she had seen with one glance, lips pulled into a thin line. "Dance with me."

Nobody else is dancing, yet her palm is pulled magnetically into his, her other atop his shoulder. They begin to move together, all the practised steps, all the right motions to fit the beat. They spiral together amidst the chaotic jumble of faces, voices and shapes. They are perfectly synchronous, bodies talking the same language after so many years of learning to exist in silence.

It doesn't matter that when they first met, their only idea of dancing was to swirl around madly, arms outstretched until you were too dizzy to stand. It doesn't matter that twenty years separates that time from now. Now is all that matters.

"Am I interrupting something?" Her husband is alone, stood on the fringes of their bubble of existence, palms open and raised. He wants to know who this is. He wants to take her moment away. The golden band of his wedding ring is an angry 'o' of exclamation.

Her dance partner squeezes her palm in his, a reassurance. The buildings are taller than grass, and they can run away fast enough and far enough that he will never find them, breathless and giggling in their hiding place.

"I'm tired of standing still. I want to run."

He is getting angry, she can tell. This excited her. She is tired of sighs, of stares of disapproval. They are empty gestures, passive gestures. She doesn't have to react. Anger is tangible. Anger is real.

"What are you talking about? Come on, I'd better get you home."

"I'm not a child, Cloud." His name bubbles past her lips, bilious, bitter. "And I'm not _her_."

"Tifa…"

"No. You don't get to say my name."

The voices and the faces and the shapes are all focussed on them. She knows she is gripping his hand too tightly. She remembers the sticky impression of candy on their palms. She remembers the scent of sun lotion on summer-pinkened skin.

She releases his hand, twisting and pulling at the metal shackles about her finger. "I don't belong to you any longer. It's over." The metallic clink as her wedding rings fall to the floor and scatter distracts Cloud, and she takes a moment to turn to him.

"Vincent, I don't want to go home. Please, get me out of here."

He smiles and they duck and run together, out of the fire exit and out into the street. His car is not far he tells her. Her heels click on tarmac, their shadows passing in and out of the ugly neon splurges that invade the darkness. She does not see them, though. Instead she is running without her shoes across a dirt track, surrounded by sun drenched wheat fields.

She is home.

-0-

He is watching her through the blue-grey haze of cigarette smoke. They agreed to meet halfway into nowhere, at a diner - Daisy's or was it Denny's? – it didn't really matter. She looked exhausted. As she took a drag from the cigarette again, he notes how old it makes her look.

"Cloud tried to make me keep my wedding rings," She almost chuckled, picking at a loose thread in her leggings. She has drawn her knees up, trusted and worn sneakers resting on the edge of the battered seat. "I told him they didn't mean anything to me anymore."

"Is that really true?" He asks. "Aren't you just angry?"

"I don't know…" the cigarette burns away to itself, temporarily forgotten, pinched between her ill-practised fingertips. "I thought I was. I suppose I'd known for longer than I thought I did- that he was sleeping with other people, I mean."

"What made you pick that night to end it?" He wants to know why seeing him again, twenty years on, seemed to trigger her decision.

"I've been living like a ghost – and I know the antithesis in that sentence. I just _existed_ in his shadow. I wasn't his wife, I was a spectre that haunted him, hoping he might realise I was there and remember how he used to love me, once, and not them."

"Them?""

"Everyone. He loves to be surrounded by people – I don't think he discriminates. I had never really been his focus of attention, even when we were just married." She stubs out the cigarette in the ashtray dismissively, retaining the last lungful of smoke before it escapes all at once in her heavy sigh. "I'm just sorry that you had to see it. You must think me a complete mess."

"Not a complete one."

She laughs, and the heavy crust of misery that had seemed to have settled over her permanently was cracking. "We've known each other since we were small, until we started getting taller. I left that summer for college, remember?"

She chanced a glance up through her lashes, though he doesn't allow her to unsettle him. "You were always stubborn, even from being very little. I knew that… I knew I wanted to be with you, Tifa. Just… Just not like that."

"I know… I was- I was an idiot. I shouldn't-"

"You shouldn't be apologising for something that happened so long ago. Hell, Tifa, I'm almost forty now. I've had time to think about it, rationalise it, and know exactly what went wrong- I daresay you have, too." He remembers that he had ordered coffee when they arrived, though a testy sip confirms it is long past saving – cold.

"It's probably stupid, you know, dwelling on the past. But I've always had that thought – you know, _what if…_" She rubs at her arms, as if cold. Someone had left the door open, and the cold winter air blasted in.

He hesitates for a moment, worrying his bottom lip. The rift between them might be too deep to cross, but he might at least try. "Tifa, let's get out of here. Have dinner with me."

She glanced up, amber eyes wide. Then she smiles, and he can't even think about all the reasons he shouldn't be doing this. It's her, it's always been her.

-0-


End file.
